University of Southern Maine

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USM Students’ Artificial Intelligence Program to Compete at World Congress on Computational Intelligence

May 27, 2008

Like many their age, Alan Fitzgerald of Windham and Peter Kemeraitis of Rumford spent more than a few hours playing Ms. Pac-Man, one of the most popular video games of all time.

Over the last five months, USM students Fitzgerald and Kemeraitis have spent countless hours preparing for the Ms. Pac-Man game of their lives: a special Ms. Pac-Man competition at the upcoming World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong.

Under the guidance of USM Professor Clare Bates Congdon, Fitzgerald and Kemeraitis have created an artificial intelligence program so that a computer can play Ms. Pac-Man. The project has progressed so well that the team will travel to Hong Kong to pit their work against that of other researchers at the international conference. Kemeraitis, an undergraduate majoring in computer science, works as a computer technician at Mountain Valley High School in Rumford. He’ll be unable to make the trip to Hong Kong because of school commitments.   

In Ms. Pac-Man, the player scores points by eating dots and avoiding ghosts. Power-pellets, or energizers, change the ghosts, which reverse their course and can be eaten for bonus points. The game is a topic of artificial intelligence research because the game is different each time it is played. Thus, a winning sequence of moves cannot be memorized, which means that a computer program playing the game has a much harder task than one might first guess.

The major challenge of the competition in Hong Kong will be to have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables the computer to make split-second decisions based on screen captures from the game, while determining what to do next.

“Those real-time decisions and responses are a major challenge,” says Fitzgerald, “especially in this game, where the ghosts don’t follow the same paths.”  Random tests of their system to date indicate that their computer player, or “agent” as it is referred to in technical terms, has roughly the same capabilities as an average human player. “So far, our agent has scored a high of 18,050 points,” says Fitzgerald,  “which is better than the results reported in the 2007 competition.” (The world-record for a human player stands at 921,360 points.)

This type of research, notes Congdon, has practical applications well beyond computerized video games. “Artificial intelligence systems are seeing increasing use, ranging from manufacturing and military applications, to Mars explorers and entertainment.”  

The competition – one of many activities and presentations scheduled for the upcoming World Congress – is designed to spark interest in particular facets of artificial intelligence research. The themes of the conference encompass many facets of computational research and applications, including the annual bioinformatics (the use of artificial intelligence techniques to study the human genome) session that Congdon helps organize.

Fitzgerald, who earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at USM, is enrolled in USM’s graduate program in computer science. “I didn’t have that much experience in artificial intelligence until taking Professor Congdon’s course last fall and then deciding to take on this project as an independent study.” Fitzgerald works for L-3 Communications, designing workflow tracking systems.

“Alan and Peter have both been working on this project since January,” says Congdon. “We’ve worked exceptionally well as a team and their hard work is paying off.”

More information on the World Congress on Computational Intelligence is available at http://www.wcci2008.org/

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